Issue 16 (Summer 1985)

About this issue and the next . . .

In this issue, we continue from Issue
XIV the discussion of the design argument. William Thwaites leads off with an
article about the natural formation of new proteins. "Letters to the Editor"
continues the dialogue with responses to material published in previous issues
of Creation/Evolution. Although we have on hand a new response from
Norman Geisler, we chose not to publish it this issue. In this way, we could
catch up on some of the letters written in response to his earlier
contributions. Dr. Geisler's newest response will appear in the next issue,
along with a special article by Hubert Yockey.

Also in this issue, we
focus on the fossil record. James S. Monroe writes in detail on the horse
series, a series often challenged by creationists. Dr. Monroe not only shows how
the creationist challenges are off the mark but makes clear that the horse
series is linked to fossil sequences of other perissodactyls. The evidence shows
a radiating evolutionary pattern that extends far beyond what creationists could
conveniently relabel as "variation within the original created kind."

John
Wolf and James S. Mellett provide a scholarly history of "Nebraska Man" that
reveals how a "pig's tooth" was mistaken for the tooth of a human ancestor and
how the error was discovered. Creationists make much of such corrected errors of
evolutionary scientists while asking us not to do likewise with their own
corrected errors.

Title:

About this issue and the next . . .

Volume:

5

Number:

2

Quarter:

Summer

This version might differ slightly from the print publication.

Page(s):

Inside cover

Year:

1985

New Proteins Without God's Help

Creationists seem to be proud of their calculations that
supposedly show how thermodynamics and probability prevent the chance formation
of biologically useful macromolecules such as enzymes. Their "evidence" usually
consists of quotations from such authors as Hubert P. Yockey, who agrees that
catalytically active proteins cannot occur by chance. Yockey (1977a and b),
looking at fully evolved proteins, says that their information content is too
high for their chance formation.

Creationists do their own calculations to
show that the chance formation of biologically useful proteins is impossible.
These calculations almost always involve the erroneous assumption that each of
the many amino acid positions in a protein must be filled by the one particular
amino acid suitable for that position. Since there are twenty different amino
acids available for each position, the chance of randomly getting a string of
200 amino acids all in the right order is (1/20)200. If you plug this
expression into a calculator, it will tell you that it equals essentially zero.
Thus, the creationists say, you can't get such a protein by a chance ordering of
amino acids. As Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) put it
(1976), "The time required for a single catalytically active protein molecule to
arise by pure chance would be billions of times the assumed age of the
earth."

But proteins, even modern highly evolved specialized proteins, are
not built with that degree of specificity. What's more, many proteins show in
their structure that they were built of smaller subunit sequences of amino acids
(Doolittle, 1981) or they have a simple metalo-organic core that could have
functioned alone as a primitive precursor of today's complex enzyme. So the
creationist calculations give an answer of zero probability because the
creationists make at least two major errors in their assumptions: they assume a
degree of specificity that has not been shown to exist in real proteins,
and they insist
that newly formed proteins must be as efficient as their older and highly
evolved counterparts.

 page 2 

We've been trying to explain all this to the protein
"experts" at ICR for the last seven years. We have told them that new proteins
could indeed form from the random ordering of amino acids. We have warned them
that their calculations were based on faulty assumptions and soon someone would
document the natural formation of a new protein from the random association of
amino acids.

Now it has happened! Not one, but two, new proteins have been
discovered. In all probability new proteins are forming by this process all the
time, but this seems to be the first documentation of this phenomenon. The newly
discovered proteins are enzymes that break down some of the byproducts produced
during nylon manufacture. Since nylon first came into commercial production in
1940, we know that the new enzymes have formed since that time.

When the
enzymes were first discovered about 1975 (Kinoshita, et al, 1981), it was
at first thought the new enzymes arose through the modification of preexisting
enzymes that had similar functions. To test this notion, the discoverers looked
to see if the other enzymes in the same organism would react to antibodies made
against the new enzymes. But by this criterion the new enzymes were unique.
Antibodies against them found nothing similar with which to react among the
array of other enzymes in the organism.

Again it was reasoned that if the
new enzymes were just old enzymes with minor changes to allow digestion of nylon
byproducts, they should retain at least a slight amount of activity with their
original substrates. But the new enzymes had no activity on biologically derived
molecules having similar chemical structures. So, by this attribute as well, the
new enzymes were seen to be unique.

It seemed that if the new enzymes were
indeed derived from randomly ordered amino acids, they would be very inefficient
compared to the usual highly evolved enzyme, since the new enzymes would not
have had billions of years of natural selection to reach a pinnacle of
biological perfection. It has been shown that one of the new enzymes (the linear
oligomer hydrolase) has about 2% of the efficiency demonstrated by three
other enzymes that perform similar reactions with biologically derived
substrates (Kinoshita, et al). Thus, by this criterion, as well as the
others, the enzyme appears to be newly formed.

 page 3 

More recently, another
analysis (Ohno, 1984) added further evidence that at least one of the proteins
was formed from an essentially random sequence of amino acids. This evidence is
a little bit more difficult to understand since its comprehension involves some
understanding of how the genetic code works. I'll just have to refer readers who do not have this
background to an explanation such as Suzuki, et. al, 1976. It appears
that the DNA that formed the gene was somewhat unusual since it could be "read"
without finding a "stop" word in any of the three "reading frames." It can be
shown that such DNA sequences could easily occur through the well-known process
of duplication. The DNA sequence suggests that a simple "frame-shift" mutation
could have brought about the chance formation of at least this one enzyme.
"Frame-shift" mutations are known for forming totally new and essentially random
arrays of amino acids since the code is "read" in a new reading frame. Usually
the proteins that are formed by frame-shift mutations are totally useless
sequences of amino acids that have no structural, antigenic, or enzymatic
relationship to the original protein. This time, however, the new protein was
useful. Being useful, it was retained by natural selection and was finally
discovered by biochemists who noticed a bacterium that could live on industrial
waste.

All of this demonstrates that Yockey (1977a and b), Hoyle and
Wickramasinghe (1981), the creationists (Gish, 1976), and others who should know
better are dead wrong about the near-zero probability of new enzyme formation.
Biologically useful macromolecules are not so information-rich that they could
not form spontaneously without God's help. Nor is help from extraterrestrial
cultures required for their formation either. With this information in hand, we
can wonder how creationists can so dogmatically insist that life could not have
started by natural processes right here on
earth.

Basic Created Kinds and the Fossil Record of Perissodactyls

"Original kinds have been stable" is a tenet of "scientific"
creationism, and scientific evidence can be given to support this tenet. At
least, this is the claim of creation "scientists." Evidence usually cited
includes probability, thermodynamics, the "impossibility" of beneficial
mutations, and the fossil record, all of which are intended to show that
evolution from "kind" to "kind" could not have occurred. The intent of this
article is to show that the concept of a "basic created kind" is without
meaning, especially when applied to fossil animals, and to demonstrate that the
fossil record shows all perissodactyls are interrelated, therefore must all be
of the same "kind" based on the only logical criterion for assigning fossils to
"kinds."

Basic Created Kinds

Creationists conceive of a "basic
created kind" as an organism which when created possessed considerable genetic
potential for variation. This is commonly cited as "creative forethought" to
allow these "kinds" to adapt, within limits, to changing environments (Morris,
1974; Hiebert, 1979). These "basic created kinds" have varied within limits thus
accounting for the diversity of modern life forms. Common examples are a basic
dog "kind" that gave rise to all varieties of dogs, from jackals to coyotes, a
basic finch "kind" to account for Darwin's finches, and a basic horse "kind"
that varied to give rise to all modern horses and many, or perhaps all, fossil
horses. So variation, or microevolution, is allowed, but creationists
emphatically deny that one "kind" could give rise to another "kind"
(macroevolution).

- page 5 -

The absolute number of
"basic created kinds" would probably be irrelevant to creationists were it not
for two things. One is the demonstrated ability to induce variation by
artificial selection and controlled experiments. The second, and probably most
important, is that the size of Noah's Ark is known, at least approximately, and
so the number of kinds must be reduced to something manageable. To accomplish
this, aquatic "kinds" are usually not included as passengers on the ark. But
this still leaves a space problem, and far too many "kinds" for Noah and his
family to care for. Accordingly, "kinds" are further reduced to a dog "kind," a
cat "kind," and so on.

The estimates of "basic created kinds" vary
enormously. Jones (1973, p. 104) equates "kinds" roughly with the family and
concludes (p. 107) that, "The number of animals under Noah's care probably did
not exceed 2,000. . . ." These 1000 "kinds" (actually Jones p. 105 argues
for 700 kinds) include mostly reptiles, birds and mammals. At the other extreme
is Hiebert's (1979, p. 16) conclusion that ". . . species correspond roughly to
original created kinds in Genesis chapter one." He does amend this statement by
saying biological species ". . . do not always correspond to original
kinds."

It is difficult to see how creationists could take either author's
concept of a "kind" very seriously, but at least one (Moore, 1983) sees some
value in Jones' ideas. Using Jones' concept, it would seem that goats, sheep,
musk ox, bison, wildebeests and gazelles all were derived from an
ancestral bovid "kind." And of course the okapi and giraffe also must have been
derived from a single "kind."

Hiebert simply overloads the ark, even if
aquatic kinds are omitted. In addition, Hiebert's formalization of what a "kind"
is must surely be too restrictive for most creationists. For example, he insists
(p. 114) that new species cannot arise because the chromosome number of each is
"rigidly fixed." On p. 113 he argues that more complex animals should show an
increasing number of chromosomes if evolution is true, and since there is no
such correlation, each organism possessing a different number of chromosomes
represents a separately created "kind." The problem is that the basic horse kind
of most creationists now has no meaning since the chromosomes vary from 32 in
Hartman's zebra, to 46 in Grevy's zebra, to 56 in the onager, to 66 in
Przewalski's horse (Gould, 1983, p. 362). Perhaps Hiebert thinks each is a
"basic created kind" (he seems to contradict this on p. 60), but it is doubtful
that other creationists would agree.

Between Jones' 700 "kinds" and
Hiebert's unspecified but undoubtedly large number of "kinds" are somewhat more
moderate estimates. Whitcomb and Morris (1961) and LaHaye and Morris (1976)
argue for 35,000 and 50,000 animals on the ark respectively. The former estimate
seems to be taken from Mayr's list of 17,600 species of mammals, birds, reptiles
and amphibians, although Whitcomb and Morris (p. 69) say: ". . . but
undoubtedly the number of original
'kinds' was less than this."

- page 6 -

Aside from their vague estimates of the
number of "kinds," creationists have also left their definition of a "basic
created kind" rather vague, a point noted by Judge Overton in the Arkansas
decision. This vagueness is probably intentional since any definitive statement
invariably leads to problems, as in the case of Hiebert and his criterion of
chromosome numbers. Indeed, creationist criteria for "kinds" seem to be
variable, depending on the needs of the moment (Awbrey, 1981). The most
commonly cited criterion is infertility, but morphology is included when
infertility fails (Wysong, 1976, p. 60). Moore (1983 , p. 203) includes both:

A kind is a distinct group of interbreeding organisms
found in a particular geographic area which are (sic) genetically isolated
from other recognizably different organisms.

Since infertility sometimes
fails (see Kitcher, 1982, p. 151-155) "recognizably different"
(morphology) is used. But what does "recognizably different" mean? All would
agree that whales and sparrows are "recognizably different" and "genetically
isolated." However, most would also probably agree that goats and sheep are
"recognizably different," but they can hybridize. Two species of zebras,
Equus burchelli and Equus grevyi, have overlapping ranges but are
not known to hybridize (Keast, 1965). And some species of fruit flies are
"genetically isolated" yet not "recognizably different." In the final analysis,
the concept of a "basic created kind" becomes meaningless; "kinds" are simply
whatever creationists want them to be.

But, if these criteria of "genetic
isolation" and "recognizably different" are objectively applied, what is the
result? Hyenas are certainly dog-like in appearance, have a social structure and
habits similar to those of some dogs, but they do not hybridize, so they are
"genetically isolated." Nevertheless, if hyenas were derived from an ancestral
dog "kind" one would still expect to see some indication of this genetic
relationship. In fact, hyenas are more closely related to the viverrids (genet
cats, civits and mongooses) and cats: "This has been established from recent
studies of chromosome patterns . . ., and especially from fossil evidence. . . ."
(Kruuk, 1972, p. 269). Gregory and Hellman (1939, p. 331), Romer (1966, p. 233) and Colbert (1980, p. 345) all note that the late
Miocene-early Pliocene genus Ictitherium is transitional between
viverrids and hyenas.

Gish, in Evolution: The Fossils Say No! (1978),
gives his views on "basic created kinds," but his discussion is even less
informative than those of other creationist writers. Humans are of course a
"kind" (p. 32), and gibbons, chimpanzees, and gorillas are also each
"kinds" (p. 35). But on p. 47 he lists apes as a "major kind," and
also dinosaurs. Based on this statement alone, it would seem that a "major ape
kind" gave rise to all other apes. However, Gish's previous discussion (p. 35) muddies this point, for although he
states that each ape is a "kind,"
he further discusses "kinds" within "kinds," whatever that means. So, Gish's
concept of a "basic created kind" is confusing at best, yet it appears in a book
advertised for use in public schools.

- page 7 -

Gish is, however, clear and partly
correct on one point. Some animals, although not all that he lists, do appear in
the fossil record with all the characteristics of a "kind." Bats are
full-fledged bats when they appear in the Eocene, and, so far at least, no
intermediates between them and their insectivore ancestors have been found.
Creationists are quite fond of this point and use it often. They should derive
only slight comfort from this fact, however, since there are numerous well
documented examples of evolutionary relationships that go beyond what is
accepted as variation within "kinds."

Obviously infertility cannot be the
criterion to determine fossil "kinds." Morphology will have to be used, so the
question becomes, will creationists apply this criterion objectively and
consistently, or will they simply establish arbitrary "kinds" as the need
arises? Most likely the latter, because if morphology is applied objectively and
consistently, animals as "recognizably different" as hyenas and civits would end
up as members of the same "basic created kind."

Perissodactyls

The
living perissodactyls are grouped into three familiesEquidae, Rhinocerotidae,
and Tapiradae, all of which are "reproductively isolated" and "recognizably
different." Nevertheless, they are united by several shared characteristics. For
example, the cusp pattern of the cheek teeth is similar, a condition referred to
as lophodont. The dentition does vary in crown height, being highcrowned
(hypsodont) in grazers (equids and one rhinoceros), and low-crowned
(brachyodont) in browzers (the tapirs and other rhinoceroses). The digits in the
hind foot are reduced to three or one, and the front foot has one, three or four
digits. But in all, the plane of symmetry of the foot passes through the third
toe. In addition, the calcanium and astragalus, although present in the ankle of
all mammals, are uniquely perissodactyl.

There is considerable variation
in living and fossil perissodactyls, but most such variation is related to
specializations in diet as reflected in the dentition, and skeletal
modifications related to locomotion and size. For example, limb element
reduction, an adaptation for running, is extreme in horses, while the heavy
rhinoceroses and extinct titanotheres have those skeletal modifications related
to large size. It seems unlikely that creationists would consider horses,
rhinoceroses and tapers to represent variation within a single "created kind,"
but if perissodactyls are considered in detail, some questions
arise.

- page 8 -

It seems odd that the Creator saw
fit to give zebras perissodactyl teeth and ankles and one toe, while giving
Thompson's gazelle and the wildebeest artiodactyl teeth and ankles and two toes.
After all, these animals live side by side, eat the same grass, and flee from
predators. There are behavioral differences which reduce interspecific
competition (Bell, 1971), but overall they seem to have been "designed" to do
the same thing. Did the Creator have two plans for plains-dwelling, grazing,
running animals? If so, it seems that one plan was inferior to the other since
perissodactyls of this type were formerly much more abundant and varied, but now
constitute only a small part of the mammalian fauna. Indeed, all
perissodactyls have declined in abundance and diversity. But we are told
that "design" is a strong argument for creation, and that creation was perfect
and complete (Morris, 1974). Of course the entire earth, and all upon it, is in
a state of decline (the principle of disintegration according to Morris, 1974),
but why should this affect perissodactyls and not artiodactyls?

At the
family level, modern perissodactyls are quite different one from the other, but
does this hold up if each family is traced back in the fossil record? It should
according to Gish (1978, p. 47) who claims:

We would thus expect to find
the fossilized remains, for example, of cats, dogs, bears, elephants, cows,
horses, bats, dinosaurs, crocodiles, monkeys, apes, and men without evidence of
common ancestors. Each major kind at its earliest appearance in the record would
possess, fully developed, all the characteristics that are used to define that
particular kind.

This prediction is simply not borne out by the fossil
record. Creationists will no doubt disagree and gleefully point out that bats
and rodents appear abruptly with no evidence of ancestral forms. However,
creation "science" is all or nothing, either nothing evolved or everything
evolved. With this in mind, let us look at the fossil record of the
perissodactyls-horses, tapirs, rhinoceroses, and the extinct titanotheres and
chalicotheres.

Horses

The following account is concerned with
those equid genera and evolutionary trends that led from Hyracotherium to
Equus. This is not to minimize the fact that horse evolution was actually
a complex of diverging lineages, at least after the appearance of Miohippus
in the late Oligocene. These other lineages are important, interesting, and
well documented by fossils, but are peripheral to the main argument advanced in
this article. The following account briefly reviews the overall trends in horse
evolution, presents a brief description of the "main line" genera, and concludes
by addressing those criticisms voiced by
creationists.

- page 9 -

Some major trends in
horse evolution were: 1) increase in size; 2) lengthening of the legs and
feet; 3) reduction of lateral toes; 4) molarization of premolars; 5)
development of high-crowned, cement-covered cheek teeth; 6)
increasing complexity of the enamel pattern of the cheek teeth; and 7)
changes in skull proportions to accommodate high-crowned cheek teeth. These
trends were not uniform, nor did they all occur simultaneously. For example,
horses actually decreased in size slightly in the Eocene, but the "main line"
genera increased in size thereafter. Molarization of the premolars largely
preceded the reduction of lateral toes. Some trends, however, were interrelated
and proceeded at more-or-less the same rate. The change in skull proportions,
for example, occurred along with the development of high-crowned cheek
teeth.

Horse evolution begins with Hyracotherium, first described
by Owen (1841) based on specimens from the London Clay. Early North
American discoveries were referred to as Eohippus, but it eventually
became clear that both Hyracotherium and Eohippus were similar
enough to be included in the same genus, so the earlier name applies. Owen did
not realize that Hyracotherium was related to modem horses, and, in fact,
he compared it with some other animals. This is a point exploited by
creationists and will be discussed later.

Horse evolution was largely a
North American phenomenon. There were Old World Eocene genera, and the European
paleotheres diverged from the ancestral equid stock but died out in the
Oligocene. Some later Cenozoic genera, especially those in the Miocene and
Pliocene, migrated from North America to the Old World and to South America, but
Hyracotherium to Equus evolution was a North American event. The
"main line" horse genera are briefly described in the following paragraphs. See
Figure 1.

Hyracotherium (Eohippus):

This little animal varied from
about ten to twenty inches at the shoulder (Simpson, 1951), and served as
the ancestral stock for all later horses. Hyracotherium is reported from
late Paleocene age sediments (Morris, 1968; MacFadden, 1982), but
Savage and Russell (1983) note that these specimens are probably early Eocene.
In any case, early Eocene specimens are common. The forefoot had four fully
functional toes; the fifth toe was smallest, and no vestige of the first
metacarpal remained. The hind foot had three toes. In each jaw there were four
premolars and three molars, all of which were low-crowned.

Orohippus:

The differences between middle Eocene Orohippus and Hyracotherium
are slight.

Orohippus and Hyracotherium are very similar
to each other in almost all known anatomical characters (Kitts, 1957, p.
1).

The fact that advanced species of Hyracotherium and primitive
species of Orohippus resemble one another so closely clearly indicates
that Hyracotherium
was the immediate ancestral form
. . . (Kitts, 1957, p. 32).

- page 10 -

The main
difference between these two genera is that the third and fourth upper premolars
of Orohippus have four cusps of roughly equal size, and the heel of the
third lower molar is relatively shorter than in Hyracotherium (MacFadden,
1976). That is, the upper premolars of Orohippus were more molariform
than in Hyracotherium.

Epihippus:

Epihippus appeared in the
late Eocene, and differs little from Orohippus. The upper and lower third
and fourth premolars were molariform, and the first lower premolar was
single-rooted rather than double-rooted as in Orohippus and
Hyrocotherium. According to MacFadden (1976, p. 11): "This degree of
premolar molarization is nearly approximated in some advanced specimens of
Orohippus."

Mesohippus-Miohippus:

Mesohippus was the early
Oligocene descendant of Epihippus. It differs from its ancestor in the
reduction of metacarpals to three (II, III, and IV), but a small vestige of a
fourth remained. The most notable difference was in the second upper premolar
which was molariform and thus advanced over the stage in Epihippus.
Various species of Mesohippus vary in size but average about 24
inches at the shoulder.

Mesohippus died out in the middle
Oligocene, but not before giving rise to Miohippus, In general, species
of Miohippus were larger than Mesohippus, and differed from their
ancestor in some other details. For example, a small infold of enamel of the
upper molars, the crochet, appeared as an occasional variation, but became a
constant feature in many later horses. Also in Miohippus, and all later
horses, the cannon bone (third metatarsal) was in contact with the ectocuneiform
and cuboid, while in earlier forms it only contacted the ectocuneiform.
Miohippus is not known after the early Miocene.

Parahippus:

Parahippus, an early to middle Miocene genus, intergrades with Miohippus
on the one hand, and with its descendant, Merychippus, on the other.
Molarization of premolars was already completed in Mesohippus, but that
genus showed the first indication of lengthening of the limbs and feet, a trend
also seen in Parahippus. The crochet, seen as a variant in some specimens
of Miohippus, was consistently present on the upper molars of
Parahippus. The trend toward high-crowned teeth and the addition of
cement to the cheek teeth are both first seen in Parahippus.

Cement
first appears as a mere film on the teeth of some members but not others
in single populations. Gradually it comes to characterize whole populations and,
still varying, it increases in average thickness until it reaches an evident
optimum about which it fluctuates without further secular change down to recent
Equus (Simpson, 1953, p. 106-107).

- page 11 -

Figure 1: Evolution of the horse family (greatly simplified), showing the transition from Hyracotheriumto the modern horse, Equus, and the evolution of the forelimb.

- page 12 -

Merychippus:

Although
later species of Parahippus are difficult to distinguish from
Merychippus, a middle and late Miocene genus, the latter is generally
considered to be the first grazing horse. All of the molariform cheek
teeth were high-crowned
(hypsodont), richly covered with cement, and the enamel pattern on the chewing
surfaces was more complex, Merychippus stood about 40 inches at the
shoulder, the size of some modern ponies. The feet were still functionally
three-toed, but the side toes were further reduced compared with earlier
genera.

Pliohippus-Dinohippus-Equus:

The modern stage of evolution
is closely approached with the appearance of Pliohippus in the Miocene.
Pliohippus shows further progression in those trends established much
earlier, For example, Pliohippus was functionally one-toed, although some
early species still possessed minute side toes not seen in later species. The
molariform cheek teeth were much like those of Merychippus except they
were higher-crowned, had more cement, and a more complex enamel pattern. The
cheek teeth were, however, markedly curved unlike those of
Equus.

Dinohippus was the later Miocene descendant of
Pliohippus, and in the Pliocene gave rise to Equus. Both genera
are very similar to one another. Dinohippus was restricted to North
America, but Equus migrated to the Old World where it survives, although
in considerably reduced numbers.

To summarize, size increase was rather
constant in the "main line" genera from Mesohippus to Equus.
Molarization of the premolars was completed when Mesohippus appeared,
but hypsodonty and cement are first seen in their incipient stages in
Parahippus. Changes in skull proportions occurred more-or-less with the
continued development of increasingly high-crowned cheek teeth. Reduction of
toes from four to three in the forefoot probably occurred within Mesohippus, and further reduction of toes to one, in both forefeet and hind feet,
occurred in Pliohippus. Limb elongation is first seen in Mesohippus
with later genera showing a continuation of this trend.

Surprisingly,
creationists have written very little on horse evolution. Wysong (1976), Gish (1978), and Hiebert (1979) each devote little more than a
page to the topic. Cousins (1971) presents the most complete coverage,
but his paper is mostly a report on the work of Nilsson in 1954 who
derived some of his data from Abel, a 1929 source; the latter work
claimed by Cousins/ Nilsson (?) ". . . to be representative of the present
position of relevant research." This is quite a remarkable statement in view of
the hundreds of papers on horse evolution which have appeared since 1929. Nonetheless, it is true that only one general summary work has appeared in
recent decades (Horses by G. G. Simpson, 1951), and, as Woodburne
and MacFadden (1982) point out, the early workers had the overall story
essentially correct.

- page 13 -

Cousins (1971) concentrates on two transitions
in the horse lineage, Epihippus to Mesohippus and Parahippus
to Merychippus. According to Cousins (p.
106):

Epihippus is the last of the old horses, while
Mesohippus is the first of the new horses. Between these we have a very
considerable jump. For the first were small animals, only as big as foxes,
with four-toed forefeet; only with the latter did the large, three-toed type
first occur.

It seems that size and the number of toes in the forefront is
the evidence for this "considerable jump." Kofahl (1977, p. 66) has
almost certainly paraphrased and elaborated a bit on Cousins' work in his
discussion of Hyracotherium, Orohippus, and
Epihippus:

. . . the average size of these creatures,
sometimes called 'old horses', decreases along the series, which is
contradictory to the normal evolutionary rule, and they were all no larger
than a fox.

Between Epihippus and Mesohippus, the next genus
in the horse series, there is a considerable gap.

In addition to these
statements simply being wrong, Kofahl has cited none other than Simpson (1951) as his source. Simpson said no such thing, and in fact on p. 117 stated:

The larger species of eohippus were not particularly
tiny animals: they were about half the size of a Shetland pony.

It is true
that later Eocene horses, Orohippus and Epihippus, were somewhat
smaller than Hyracotherium, but not by much. Species of Hyracotherium
varied from 10 to 20 inches at the shoulder, and the mounted skeleton
of Orohippus in the Peabody Museum of Natural History measures 13 or 14 inches at the shoulder. "The typical height [of
Mesohippus] was probably about 6 hands (24 inches) although
species considerably smaller and larger are known" (Simpson, 1951, p. 124).
Lull (1931, p. 18) described Mesohippus bairdi as about 18 inches in height, but noted that Mesohippus intermedius was much
larger. Scott and Jepsen (1941, p. 911) described Mesohippus as
about the size of a greyhound.

Cousins' "very considerable jump" in size
is a creationist myth. But can the three-toed forefoot of Mesohippus
substantiate Cousins' claim? Paleontologists have for a long time maintained
that Mesohippus was the first threetoed horse. For example, Scott (1891, p. 324-325) states:

The metacarpus . . . consists of
three functional members, the second, third, and fourth, and one
rudimentary, the fifth.

The fifth metacarpal is represented by a rudiment
which carries no phalanges. The head is as large as in No. IV, but the shaft is
very slender and tapers rapidly to a point.

Taken with the other
similarities between Mesohippus and Epihippus, it would seem the
rudimentary fifth metacarpal would be compelling evidence for a close
relationship. Creationists of course demand more.

It is not widely known,
except among those who study mammalian evolution, but Mesohippus with
four metacarpals and only three toes has been known at least since 1975. According to MacFadden (1976, p. 12) who cites a personal
communication from Emry (1975):

- page 14 -

Recently . . . Mesohippus has been found with a fourth metacarpal
(V) that is nearly as long as metacarpal IV, which articulates with three
phalanges.

In his response to my inquiry for additional data on four-toed
Mesohippus, Dr. Emry of the National Museum of Natural History kindly
gave permission to use his data. He pointed out that forefeet of middle
Oligocene Mesohippus are well known, and as far as he is aware all are
three-toed. But there are specimens representing at least two individuals from
the early Oligocene of Wyoming which have four metacarpals as noted by MacFadden
above. Dr. Emry further noted that the Wyoming specimens have dentition much
like that of Mesohippus hypostylus, which means that the second premolars
are molariform.

It seems that the main difference between Epihippus
and Mesohippus is the molarization of the second premolars. The
number of toes will no longer help creationists since: "The present specimens
suggest that the reduction of the most lateral digit took place within
Mesohippus rather than between Epihippus and Mesohippus" (Emry,
1984, personal communication). Some specimens of Mesohippus have forefeet
not quite like those of Epihippus, three toes but four metacarpals, which
is not characteristic of typical Mesohippus. These same specimens do have
typical Mesohippus dentition, however. In addition, some Mesohippus
species were not particularly larger than their ancestors. Even before
Emry's data were available, a compelling case for an Epihippus-Mesohippus
relationship could be made. In view of the data now available, continued use
of Cousins' argument would be meaningless.

Cousins (1971) apparently
thinks that Mesohippus and Parahippus are of the same kind, but
draws a clear distinction between Parahippus and Merychippus. On
p. 107 he says:

With Merychippus and Hipparion there is a
rich group of Equus-like forms which are all separated from the former
'brachydontal' groups by a gaping evolutionary gap.

Cousins tries to make
a case for this "gaping evolutionary gap" by concentrating on toes and teeth. As
for toes he claims: "One-toedness dominated, although quite clear rudiments of
two side-toes may occur." He claims that Merychippus had hypsodont,
cement covered teeth, which is correct, but that horses of this type appeared
suddenly with no indication of ancestors. Cousins' choice of toes and teeth was
a poor one, at least in support of the creationist cause, since these two
evolutionary trends did not proceed at the same rate. Cousins is simply wrong
with respect to toes; Merychippus was three-toed as was Parahippus,
but Pliohippus was one-toed. Typical Merychippus had teeth
more similar to Pliohippus than Parahippus, however. Cousins'
"gaping evolutionary gap" may exist in his mind, but the fossils tell a
completely different story.

- page 15 -

What do authorities on horse evolution have to
say about Parahippus-Merychippus relationships? Stirton (1940, p. 178)
says:

Differences between the most primitive species of Merychippus
and the most advanced species of Parahippus are hardly
distinguishable.

Forsten (1975, p. 395) in referring to fossils
from the Burkeville fauna of the Texas Gulf Coastal Plain noted that:
"Merychippus gunteri . . . resembles Parahippus leonesis in many
characteristics." Woodbume and Robinson (1977) point out that one author
(White, 1942) identified Merychippus gunteri in the Thomas Farm
fauna of Florida, but a second author (Bader, 1956) regarded these same
specimens as Parahippus leonesis. Simpson (1953, p. 104) has made
one of the strongest statements in defense of this transition:

. . . he
[Dietrich, 1949] says of Parahippus and Merychippus that no
intermediate form bridges the gap between the two, 'no gradual transition can be
established.' The statement is . . . false. There are unified samples, surely
representing local populations, perfectly intermediate between Parahippus
and Merychippus and so varying in the 'diagnostic' characters that
assignment of individuals in a single population could be made to both genera
and assignment of the population to one or the other is completely
arbitrary.

The most significant evolutionary event seen in Merychippus
was the development of hypsodont (high-crowned) cheek teeth which were
covered by cement. Most paleontologists interpret this change in dentition as an
adaptation for grazing, but it was in Parahippus ". . . that the inception
of hypsodonty took place" (Stirton, 1940, p. 177).

From
Merychippus to Equus not much need be said. Creationists no doubt
realize the futility of trying to draw distinctions between these genera and the
intermediates Pliohippus and Dinohippus. Merychippus was
functionally three-toed while the others were one-toed, and the latter genera
had higher-crowned cheek teeth, but all are recognizably horses.

Cousins (1971, p. 108) in his conclusion seems unable to clearly state what his
argument for creation is. For example, he criticizes a study done by Stecher (1968) in which that author drew evolutionary conclusions based on
variability in the chromosome count of modern equids and the variability in
their spinal columns. Cousins disagrees with Stecher's evolutionary
conclusions:

It suggests, to my mind, nothing of the kind; it shows
conclusively that the spines and chromosome counts are different in different
animals and absolutely no evolutionary argument can legitimately be imported
into his researches.

The key phrase here is "different in different
animals." Yet Cousins' final sentence reads:

- page 16 -

The horse family is unique and separate and the evidence can,
without any weighting, be fitted to the case for special creation.

Cousins
has argued that Eocene horses are different from Mesohippus, and that
Mesohippus-Parahippus are different from later horses. If they are really
as different as he claims, they cannot all represent variation within a single
"kind," so there must be three "kinds," a point with which Kofahl (1977, p.
66) seems to agree. Cousins then argues that different chromosomes and
vertebral spines occur in different animals. Is each then a different "kind"?
This isn't clear. But, if Kofahl's view is accepted, some horses must have
evolved, even if we consider it to be only microevolution. In this case,
however, Stecher was correct in the beginning. So why does Cousins argue against
him? And, worse yet, why does Cousins finally argue that the whole horse family
was specially createdas though we were back to thinking of it as a single kind?
Consistency such as this is the hallmark of pseudoscience.

Hiebert (1979, p. 60-61) concentrates on problems of size and ribs, and makes no
mention of other features showing the relationships among fossil and living
horses. He notes that Eohippus (Hyracotherium) has 18 pairs of ribs,
Orohippus has 15 pairs, Pliohippus has up to 19 pairs, and Equus scotti has 18 pairs, and concludes (p. 61): "The rib count denies any continuous evolution here." Perhaps Hiebert is
unaware, but in mammals, ribs are found on the thoracic vertebrae, and the
number of thoracic vertebrae and hence the number of ribs varies (Romer, 1962). The rib count is usually consistent in a species, but even here
there is some variation, for example, in some individual humans (Crouch, 1965). And among the equids, Epstein (1971, p. 422) reports that
modern horses may have 17, 18 or 19 pairs of
ribs.

Creationists are particularly fond of small modern horses, dwarfed
Argentine horses for example, and try to make a case for their similarity to
some of the smaller fossil horses (Wysong, 1976, p. 304; Hiebert, 1979, p. 61). The dwarfed Argentine horse is similar only in size to
Eocene and perhaps early Oligocene horses, genera which Cousins (1971) has claimed are quite different from later equids both in size and
morphology. Moore and Slusher (1974, p. 420) think that "poor feed" may
account for some small fossil horses, and give an example of small modern horses
discovered in 1942 which reportedly were small for this reason. It seems,
however, that all known specimens of Eocene and early Oligocene horses
were small. Surely if "poor feed" were the cause, there must have been some that
enjoyed an adequate diet and "normal size." And claiming that these small horses
were simply size variants of other larger genera will not work. "Poor feed" may
account for smaller size, but it will not change molars into premolars, nor will
it add toes to the feet.

- page 17 -

Paleontologists have long been aware that there
was size variation in fossil equids. Archaeohippus (Miocene) and
Calippus (Miocene-Pliocene) do in fact show a decrease in size compared
to their contemporaries. In the "main line" leading from Hyracotherium to Equus, however, there
was a general increase in size, a point exploited by Hiebert (1979, p.
61):

Once horse fossils were found in a variety of sizes, it took little
ingenuity to line them up from smallest to largest and to insist that the
evolution of the horse has been proven.

Obviously Hiebert is charging
paleontologists with outright deception. But it has never been claimed that size
increase through time was uniform and continuous in all genera, nor is size
increase the only evidence for horse evolution.

Moore and Slusher (1974)
and Kofahl (1977) claim that horse fossils have a scattered distribution
making them useless for evolutionary studies.

. . . the fossils of these horses
are found widely scattered in Europe and North America. There is no place where
they occur in rock layers, one above another (Moore and Slusher, 1974, p.
420).

This quote contains two statements, both of which are only partly
correct. As for the scattered distribution, only two of the "main line" genera,
Hyrocotherium and Equus, are known from both Europe and North
America. All others on the "main line" are uniquely North American, and all
of the relevant genera have been recovered from sediments in the western
United States. In fact, the relevant genera are known from Utah, Wyoming,
Nebraska, and South Dakota, although the geographic distribution of some was
much greater than this. While it is true that equids lived in Europe and Asia,
it seems that the scattered distribution is true only in the broad sense; the
"main line" genera occur in a considerably more restricted area. However, this
is still a rather large area, and that brings us to the second part of the above
quote: "There is no place where they occur in rock layers, one above the
other."

A full response to this claim would be rather lengthy, because
what is really being questioned here is mammalian biostratigraphy. This is an
area in which "stage of evolution" actually has been the basis for relative age
determinations and correlations, Fortunately this issue has been dealt with in
some detail (see Schafersman, 1983, p. 238-241), so it will not be repeated
here. Suffice it to say that the relative sequence of continental
mammal-fossil-bearing strata has been independently verified by radiometric
dating. And, while it is true that the entire horse lineage is not represented
by fossils in a single area of superposed beds, there are many places where at
least parts of the sequence have been found. The fact is that in those
superposed strata containing a part of the horse lineage the sequence is
consistent.

- page 18 -

Cousins (1971) and Wysong (1976) compare Hyrocotherium
with the modern hyrax:

Hyrax, like Hyracotherium, is a
small animal, about the size of a rabbit or fox. Like these, Hyrax has
four toes on the fore-limbs and three on the hind limbs, a quite striking
similarity. The back teeth of the two genera exhibit many similarities and resemble those of the rhinoceri more
than those of horses (Cousins, 1971, p. 106).

Cousins notes that
Hyracotherium is not much like the modern horse, which is true, but then
Archaeopteryx does not resemble any modern bird, except for having
feathers, yet creationists consistently claim it was a bird. Cousins also tries
to capitalize on the fact that Owen (1841) derived the name
Hyracotherium to suggest the similarity to hyrax. There are some problems
with Cousins' arguments. For one thing, Owen did not have other fossil equids
with which to compare. Also, Owen compared Hyracotherium with pigs and
rodents. Apparently, he felt the similarities with hyrax were greater, hence the
name he chose. Superficial similarities can, however, be misleading and Owen was
not the only one to make such a mistake. For example, Colbert (1980, p. 423) notes that: "Among ancient peoples, and even among the earlier modern
naturalists, these animals [hyraxes] were thought to be rabbits of some sort
. . ." In addition, hyrax is also called a coney as are some lagomorphs.

In
view of these facts, and the fact that hyrax incisors are rodent-like, are we to
assume that the hyrax, rabbits and rodents are "amazingly similar"? One could
certainly make as good a case for this as Cousins has for the
Hyracotherium-hyrax similarities. Perhaps all Eocene horses, modern
rabbits, hyraxes and rodents (and maybe pigs too) were all derived from a single
"basic kind." All of these resemblances are, however, rather superficial. In
fact, the differences among these animals are much greater than the differences
between Epihippus and Mesohippus or between Parahippus and
Merychippus.

As evidence that the fossil record is
supposedly more in accord with creationism, Gish (1978, p. 157) quotes
Goldschmidt (1952, p. 97): "Moreover, within the slowly evolving series,
like the famous horse series, the decisive steps are abrupt without transition." Wysong (1976, p. 301) makes a similar statement: "There are no gradations
from one link to another. All suggested links appear suddenly in the fossil
record."

However, these same fossils, at least some of them, are sometimes
cited by other creationists as evidence for variation within a "basic created
kind" (Moore and Slusher, 1974, p. 420). To sum up creationist opinion on
this, then, it seems that all the following things must be true: (1) horses show
variation within a "basic created kind," (2) all of the thousands of
fossil horses were alive at the same time, (3) all were buried in
deposits of a single flood, (4) but only distinctive types without
intermediate variants were preserved. "Gaps" between these distinctive types are
used as evidence against evolution, yet the same distinctive types show
variation with a "basic created kind." Clearly, the creationist position on
horse evolution is self contradictory.

- page 19 -

Furthermore, contrary to creationist critiques, the evolutionary
relationships among horses are not based upon conjecture, supposition, or
a fragmentary or incomplete fossil record. Thousands of fossils, some of which
are exactly what creationists have demanded (intermediates between
intermediates), have provided the evidence for these relationships. So why don't
creationists simply accept this evidence? They could still claim that
Hyracotherium to Equus only shows variation within a "basic
created kind." They will not likely do this, however, since Hyracotherium is just too different from Equus. In fact, Cousins particularly has
argued that Hyracotherium is very unhorselike, and more similar to the
modern hyrax. No doubt creationists will simply continue to rely on Cousins'
work, continue to selectively quote evolutionary biologists, and/or largely
ignore horses and concentrate on bats and rats.

Tapirs

Living
tapirs are represented by a single genus and four species. Like other
perissodactyls, they were formerly more varied and abundant, but are now
geographically restricted occurring only in the New World tropics and the
Malayan area. Tapirs are large animals measuring up to eight feet long and
weighing as much as 700 pounds.

Since tapirs appear to have always been
forest dwellers, their fossil record is not as good as that of most other
perissodactyls. Nevertheless, fossils are abundant enough to document their
ancestry with a fair degree of accuracy. See Figure 2.

Tapirs are closest
to the ancestral perissodactyl condition since they have changed far less than
members of the other groups. Indeed, some authors (Scott and Jepsen, 1941) consider them living fossils because so little change has occurred,
especially since the Oligocene. All tapirs, living or fossil, have four-toed
forefeet and three-toed hind feet, and have low-crowned teeth. However, modern
forms have only two premolars in each jaw. The most notable evolutionary trends
were the development of a short proboscis and an increase in size with the
skeleton becoming stouter.

The earliest tapiroids, Homogalax
(Family Isectolophidae) and Heptodon (Family Helaletidae), are found
in strata of early Eocene age. Neither is particularly different from the
earliest of the horse series, Hyracotherium, but Homogalax shows a
greater similarity than does Heptodon. Both genera were small, a little
larger than Hyracotherium, and both were also similar to a third middle
Eocene tapiroid genus, Hyrachyus (Family Helaletidae).

- page 20 -

Hyrachyus
differs from Heptodon only in being slightly larger and in
having slightly higher crested
teeth and no third molar hypoconulid . . . (Radinsky, 1968, p. 317).

This is
an important point since most authorities think Hyrachyus was ancestral
to "one group of primitive rhinocerotoids" (Radinsky, 1968, p. 317). In fact,
Hyrachyus has been classified as a rhinoceros by some, but the consensus
now seems to be that it is a tapiroid.

True tapirs (Family Tapiridae) are
found in the early Oligocene, being derived from ancestors like Heptodon. Protapirus has a skull length of about one foot, not quite one-half as large as
the skull of the largest modern tapirs, but the "proportions of the limb bones
are decidedly more slender" (Scott and Jepsen, 1941, p. 749). Scott and Jepsen
also noted that while the dentition is tapir-like, it is not as specialized as
in modern tapirs. Protapirus may have been developing an incipient
proboscis as evidenced by some retraction of the nasal
bones.

Miotapirus of the Miocene is the direct descendant of Protapirus, and is ancestral to Tapirus, the modern tapir. It was
somewhat smaller than Tapirus, but had strongly retracted nasals
indicating the presence of a proboscis.

Rhinoceroses

The
Family Rhinocerotidae contains four living genera and five species, all being
confined to Africa or southeast Asia. These are large animals weighing up to
3600 kg (7937 lbs.) (Kingdon, 1979). Among the fossil rhinoceroses is found the
largest known land mammal: Baluchitherium (or Indricotherium), an
Oligocene-Miocene rhinoceros of Asia, probably stood 16 to 18 feet at the
shoulder. Like all perissodactyls, rhinoceroses were formerly more varied,
abundant, and more widespread geographically, especially in the Oligocene and
Miocene, but now seem to be headed for extinction (see Martin,
1984).

Modern rhinoceroses are all recognizably rhinoceroses, but they do
show a great amount of variability. For example, three genera, Diceros,
Ceratotherium, and Dicerorhinus, have no upper or lower tusks, but do
have nasal and frontal horns. In contrast, Rhinoceros has both upper and
lower tusks, but has only a nasal horn (Matthew, 1931). In addition, the Asian
forms have folds in the skin giving them an armor-plated appearance not seen in
African forms. Rhinoceroses also vary considerably in size from the relatively
small Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) to the large white rhino
(Ceratotherium simum). There is also variation in the crown height of the
cheek teeth.

- page 21 -

Figure 2: Evolution of the rhinoceros and tapir families (greatly simplified), showing the early Perissodactyl common ancestor.

- page 22 -

Fossil rhinoceroses are placed in three families. One, the
Amynodontidae, was restricted to the Eocene and Oligocene and became extinct.
Amynodonts were probably derived from a tapiroid stock (Figure 2), but
their ancestry is not so well documented as compared to the other two families. The
otherfamilies are the Hyracodontidae, or running rhinoceroses, and the
Rhinocerotidae, or true rhinos. The former appeared first and was ancestral
to the latter.

Rhinoceros evolution is more complex than that of
other perissodactyls. Rhinoceroses were numerous and varied earlier in the
Cenozoic, and several lineages show evidence of parallel evolution. In any case,
the details would require considerable space, so I have chosen instead to
concentrate on the earliest rhinoceroses and those descendants that led to
animals that are undeniably rhinoceroses. Accordingly, the discussion will be
restricted mostly to Eocene and Oligocene forms.

As noted earlier,
the Eocene genus Hyrachyus has in the past been classified as a
rhinoceros, but most experts now agree that it belongs in the extinct tapiroid
family Helaletidae. Hyrachyus was quite similar to other early tapiroids,
especially Homogalax and Heptodon, which were in turn quite
similar to Hyracotherium. There seems to be little doubt that the
earliest rhinocerotoids, Triplopus (Family Hyracodontidae), were derived
from Hyrachyus or a Hyrachyus-like tapiroid
ancestor:

Characteristic rhinocerotoid dental features are approached in
some variants of a late middle Eocene species of Hyrachyus, which
is overlapped in dental morphology by primitive variants of an early late Eocene
species of Triplopus, a hyracodontid rhinocerotoid: thus it appears that
at least one line of hyracodontid rhinocerotoids evolved from Hyrachyus
(Radinsky, 1967, p. 12).

Hyrachyus had four toes in the
front foot and three in the hind foot, while Triplopus had three toes in
all feet. Some hyracodontids were fairly large animals measuring up to five feet
in length and two and one-half feet at the shoulder. Forstercooperia, for
example, had a skull about seventeen inches long (Lucas et al., 1981, p.
834), but Triplopus was considerably smaller.

Triplopus
was ancestral to other hyracodontids in North America, but more
importantly, in Asia it gave rise to the earliest member of the Rhinocerotidae,
Prohyracodon, from which it differed very little. Prohyracodon,
from the late Eocene, and the related Oligocene genera Caenopus,
Trigonias and Subhyracodon represent the central stock of true
rhinoceroses. These were large animals, Caenopus was up to eight feet
long, and all were rhinoceroses in every sense of the word except for being
hornless.

Horned rhinoceros, es appeared in the latest Oligocene and
Miocene. One of the earliest was Dicerorhinus, the genus to which the
modern Sumatran rhino belongs. Rhinoceros, which includes the living
Javan and Indian rhinos, is known as far back as the middle Miocene. Kingdon
(1979) reports that Paradiceros mukiri from the Miocene of Africa may be
ancestral to the modern African species. He further notes that both modern
African genera, Ceratotherium
and Diceros, were present in the Pleistocene, the latter in its
present form, but Ceratotherium praecox of the late Pliocene still shows
resemblances to Diceros, but is probably directly ancestral to
Ceratotherium simum, the modern white rhino.

- page 23 -

- page 24 -

The preceding
discussion has been intended only to demonstrate the continuity in rhinoceros
evolution. There were certainly many other Cenozoic rhinoceroses, such as the
common North American forms Hyracodon, Aphelops and Teleoceras,
but these were not ancestral to modern forms and therefore have not been
considered. In addition, there were rather bizarre Asian forms, Sinotherium
and Elasmotherium, that, unlike other horned rhinoceroses, had a
single rather large horn located on the frontal bones of the
skull.

Brontotheres (Titanotheres)

Compared with other major
perissodactyl groups, the titanotheres were short lived, first appearing in the
early Eocene and disappearing at the end of the early Oligocene. Nevertheless,
they persisted for about 21 million years, during which time they evolved from
small Hyracotherium-sized animals to giants measuring up to eight feet at
the shoulder. Numerous genera of titanotheres have been described, and while
their interrelationships are complicated, the overall trends in titanothere
evolution are quite clear. The dominant trends were the attainment of large
size, and the development of large horns on the skull. In contrast to the
equids, the cheek teeth remained unprogressive and simple; the molars were
low-crowned, and the premolars remained small and became only partly molariform.
All titanotheres had four toes in the forefoot and three in the hind foot. There
were, however, skeletal modifications related to the large size of the later
members of the family, and skull modifications related to the development of
horns.

The first titanotheres, Lambdotherium and Eotitanops, appeared in the early Eocene. The former measured about fourteen inches at
the shoulder (Osborn, 1929), and had a skull about seven inches long (Gazin,
1952, P1. 10). Except for details of the dentition, Lambdotherium
differed little from the earliest horse, Hyracotherium. Eotitanops
was about 50% larger than Lambdotherium. In this genus there was
established "the basic molar pattern that remained essentially unchanged
throughout titanothere evolutionary history" (Radinsky, 1968, p.
314).

Palaeosyops and Manteoceras are typical middle Eocene
genera. The former gave rise to a branch of titanotheres which was hornless but
had enlarged canines. The latter measured a bit over four feet at the shoulder,
and can be considered on the "main line" to the giant early Oligocene forms.
Incipient horns first appeared in
Manteoceras being represented by "the paired roughening of the nasal
bones, to which horns must have been attached" (Scott, 1945, p.
239).

- page 25 -

The late Eocene is characterized by genera like Dolichorhinus
and Protitanotherium which had rudimentary horns on elongate nasal
bones, and which were larger than modern tapirs. With the development of horns
came a change in the configuration of the skull: it became saddle shaped. This
trend is first seen in these later Eocene genera, but is more pronounced in
early Oligocene forms.

Titanotheres of the early Oligocene such as
Brontops and Brontotherium, were very large animals. The nasal
bones had large rugose horn-like structures which Stanley (1973, p. 456) thinks served "to protect the head and neck region against injury during
butting, which was probably chiefly intraspecific in nature." Brontops,
Brontotherium, and other large contemporary genera are the last titanotheres
known. Their extinction may be accounted for by their unprogressive dentition
not being suitable for the harsher vegetation that characterized the early
Oligocene and later parts of the
Tertiary.

Chalicotheres

Chalicotheres are the most peculiar
perissodactyls. Later types were large animals, about the size of modern horses,
and they had a rather horse-like appearance. However, their similarity to horses
is rather superficial. The dentition was more like that of the titanotheres, the
front limbs were longer than the hind limbs, and there were large claws on the
toes. In fact, the feet are so peculiar that in the early fossil finds of these
animals the teeth were classified as perissodactyl and the feet as edentate. The
use of these clawed feet by a somewhat horse-like animal has been the subject of
debate. Some authors (Romer, 1966; Colbert, 1980) suggest that
they were used to dig up roots and tubers. Whatever their use, they represent a
specialization not seen in any other perissodactyl group. Other than these
peculiar feet, however, the Chalicothere skeleton is typically perissodactyl
(Peterson, 1907; Romer, 1966).

Chalicotheres are divided
into two families, the Eomoropidae and the Chalicotheriidae, the former being
ancestral to the latter. Eomoropids were confined mostly to the Eocene, although
one genus, Eomoropus, persisted into the early Oligocene. Chalicotherids
range from the late Eocene to the early Pleistocene, but were most varied in the
middle Miocene when six genera were present. Chalicotheres are much more common
in Old World, especially Asian, deposits and it appears that most of their
evolution took place there. In fact, only four of the fifteen known genera are
found in North America, the last being Moropus and Tylocephalonyx
of the middle Miocene.

- page 26 -

The
earliest eomoropid, Paleomoropus of the early Eocene, is quite similar to
Hyracotherium and equid as well as Homogalax (a tapiroid). In
fact, Radinsky (1968, p. 308) notes that these three genera "are distinguished
from each other by slight differences in molar cusp pattern and in size."
Paleomoropus was about the size of a sheep, had four toes in the forefoot
and three in the hind foot, but apparently lacked the clawed feet of
Chalicotherids.

Eomoropus appeared in the middle Eocene and gave
rise to all later chalicotheres. This genus differed from its ancestor,
Paleomoropus, in details of the dentition, and from its descendants in
being "smaller and more lightly built, with feet unspecialized (digits not
sharply flexed)" (Radinsky, 1964, p. 9), and in dental details. The biggest
difference between Eomoropus and its descendants is stated by Radinsky
(1964, p. 13):

In short, I can find no features in the manus or pes of
Eomoropus which suggest in any way the extraordinary modifications
which appear in the feet of later chalicotheres.

The earliest and most
primitive genus of the Chalicotheriidae, Schizotherium, appeared in the
late Eocene. It is the only chalicothere known from the middle and late
Oligocene, but was only one of several Miocene genera. Chalicotheres were
probably never particularly abundant, but the six middle Miocene genera no doubt
represent their greatest diversity. With the appearance of Miocene
chalicotheres, such as the North American genus Moropus, not much more
occurred. These animals were large, with claws on all the functional toes (three
in each foot, although the forefoot retained a large vestige of the fifth
metacarpal). The limbs were elongated, and the skull had a long deep face
similar to the horses. To be sure, there was some variation in Miocene and later
genera, doming of the skull in some, and variations in the anterior dentition
(incisors and canines), but for the most part later chalicotheres differed
little from typical Miocene forms. Only two genera, Ancylotherium and
Nestrotherium, both Old World forms, are known from the Pliocene, and the
latter did not become extinct until the Pleistocene.

Summary

Many of
the earliest perissodactyls can be differentiated only with great difficulty.
For any one lineage there is a sequence of fossils more-or-less continuously
linking the earliest forms with their descendants. It may be argued that any one
lineage simply shows variation within a "basic created kind." But the earliest
members of each lineage are similar enough that, if morphology is the criterion
for inclusion in a "kind," they also represent a "basic created kind."
Therefore, all perissodactyls must have been derived from a single "basic
created kind." See Figure 3.

- page 27 -

The Chalicotheres developed a uniquely different kind of foot from the other
Perissodactyls. The illustration above shows the front foot of Moropus.
Note that the inner toe, rather than the middle toe, was the
largest.

- page 28 -

In view of the
perissodactyl fossil record, it seems that creationists have several options.
First, they could simply ignore the evidence, which is not scientific, and
continue to concentrate on bats and rats. Second, they could acknowledge that
perissodactyls have evolved, but no other group has (which seems unlikely).
Third, they could argue that perhaps all perissodactyls were derived from
the same "basic created kind," their fossil record thus showing evidence only of
microevolution. (This too seems unlikely since "recognizably different" animals,
zebras and rhinoceroses, would be of the same "kind.") And fourth, they could
arbitrarily divide perissodactyls into several "kinds," as Cousins seemed to do
with horses.

Creationists will almost certainly take the last option since
they have done so in the past, the mammal-like reptile-mammal transition being a
case in point. However, it is quite incredible that anyone could seriously argue
that Epihippus and Mesohippus or Parahippus and
Merychippus are really that different, especially when one considers the
variability allowed in modern "kinds." Likewise, the earliest known equid,
tapir, titanothere, and chalicothere are certainly similar enough to be
considered members of the same "kind," if the morphological criterion is applied
objectively and consistently. The earliest rhinoceroses can also be included in
this "kind" since they differ so little from the ancestral tapirs. But since
objectivity and consistency would yield negative evidence for creation
"science," such a course will not likely be followed. After all, creation "is
the basis of all true science" (Morris, 1983), and any evidence to the
contrary is irrelevant.

The more that creationists demand of the fossil
record, the weaker their case will become. Of course we will never be able to
document the pedigree of all organisms, but many can be documented. For example,
among the mammals, many artiodactyls, some carnivores, and others can be traced
back in the fossil record, demonstrating the interrelationships among many life
forms. As these data become more widely known, there will be fewer and fewer
"basic created kinds" until it is apparent that all life forms are interrelated.
Of course creationists could simply fall back on their Scopes era tactics by
claiming that all species, living or fossil, are "basic created kinds." But then
Noah's Ark would have had millions of passengers.

Acknowledgements

I
thank Philip D. Gingerich for his review of this article, Robert J. Emry for
permission to use some of his unpublished data, and James Gillingham for his
helpful discussions. Frederick Edwords made several suggestions for
improving the article, and Daniel Warren provided the
illustrations.

Gregory,
W. K. and Hellman, M. 1939. "On the Evolution and Major Classification of
the Civits (Viverridae) and Allied Fossil and Recent Carnivora: A
Phylogenetic Study of the Skull and Dentition." Proceedings American
Philosophical Society, 81:309-392.

Lucas, S. G. et al. 1981. "The Systematics of
Forstercooperia, a Middle to Late Eocene Hyracodontid (Perissodactyla:
Rhinocerotoidea) from Asia and Western North America." Journal of
Paleontology, 55:826-84 1.

Owen, R. 1841. "Description of the Fossil Remains of a
Mammal Hyracotherium lepinorum and a Bird Lithornis culturinus
from the London Clay." Transactions of the Geological Society of London,
6:203-208.

Peterson, O. A. 1907. "Preliminary Notes on Some American
Chalicotheres." The American Naturalist, 41:733-752.

Radinsky, L.
B. 1964. "Paleomoropus, a New Early Eocene Chalicothere (Mammalia,
Perissodactyla), and a Revision of Eocene Chalicotheres." American Museum
Novitates, no. 2179:1-27.

The Role of "Nebraska Man" in the Creation-Evolution Debate

In 1922, solely on the basis of a worn fossil tooth from
Nebraska, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn described Hesperopithecus
haroldcookii as the first anthropoid ape from North America. Five years
later, Osborn's colleague William King Gregory concluded that the tooth most
likely came from an extinct peccary, a pig-like animal. During its brief life,
Hesperopithecus provoked intemperate speculations about its relation to
humans, including a "reconstruction" of "Nebraska Man" by an artist in a popular
British tabloid news magazine. The Nebraska tooth also sparked some memorable
exchanges between Osborn and William Jennings Bryan, from whose home state the
tooth had come. Osborn apparently began to have doubts about his identification
of the tooth shortly before the Scopes "monkey trial" in July 1925, and he
stopped mentioning it in his publications.

Although Nebraska Man did not
survive long enough to become widely accepted by the scientific community and
was quickly forgotten when its true identity was recognized, Hesperopithecus
is again being trotted out in the current recrudescence of creationist
attacks on evolution. The creationists who belittle mistakes by scientists
cannot admit that science advances, in part, by correcting
error.

Discovery, Debate, Doubt, and Downfall

In 1917, rancher and
geologist Harold Cook found a human-looking tooth in Pliocene (recently
redesignated Miocene) sediments in northwestern Nebraska. In March 1922, Cook
submitted the specimen to Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American
Museum of Natural History and an eminent vertebrate paleontologist, to determine
the tooth's affinities.

- page 32 -

Osborn received the
tooth on March 14, 1922. He wrote to Cook: "I sat down with the tooth and I said
to myself: 'It looks one hundred per cent anthropoid'." (Osborn, 1922b, p. 2.)
One month later, Osborn announced Hesperopithecus haroldcookii as the
first anthropoid ape from America.

The tooth that became the "Ape of the
Western World" has a virtually featureless crown surface, and the comparison
with anthropoid teeth depended heavily on size and general shape. Osborn,
however, did not attempt to bury the meager evidence of H. haroldcookii
in a drawer at the American Museum. He had casts made of the tooth and sent
them to 26 institutions in Europe and the United States (Anon.,
1924a).

After seeing one of the casts, British paleontologist Arthur Smith
Woodward, who had given the world Piltdown Man, was highly skeptical, feeling
that "The occurrence of a man-like ape among fossils in North America seems so
unlikely that good evidence is needed to make it credible." (Woodward,
1922.)

Despite Woodward's doubts, British anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith
acknowledged Hesperopithecus as the third known genus of extinct
hominids, along with Eoanthropus and Pithecanthropus (Smith,
1922), and also became an accomplice to an imaginative artistic reconstruction
of Hesperopithecus that appeared in the Illustrated London News
(Forestier, 1922). Given a large spread on the two pages preceding an
article by Smith, the drawing shows a pair of very human-looking
"Hesperopithecus" individuals hunting for their next meal. In the
background, as Smith described, are various Pliocene mammals whose remains had
been recovered from the same strata that yielded the Hesperopithecus
tooth. The artist, Amedee Forestier, explained that he modeled
Hesperopithecus after "Pithecanthropus, the Java ape-man, whose
proportions and attitude were those of the average Englishman." (Forestier,
1922, p. 943.) Osborn and his colleagues at the American Museum were not
impressed with Forestier's handiwork and felt that "such a drawing or
'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no
scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate." (Anon. 1922.)

Forestier's
black-and-white drawings, especially those dealing with archeological and
anthropological discoveries, were featured in the Illustrated London News
in the first three decades of the century. One of his earlier
reconstructions had been of Piltdown Man. When the artist died in 1930, a friend
paid too-generous tribute when asserting that "Forestier was especially
interested in prehistoric man and loved to bring him to life, not by fictitious
imaginings but by the most careful reconstructions based on scientific
research." (Q., 1930.)

Forestier's reconstruction of Nebraska Man was not
reproduced in any other contemporary publication and has only recently been
"rediscovered" and reprinted by
critics of evolution (e. g., Hitching, 1982; Bowden, 1981; see also Fix,
1984).

- page 33 -

The argument over Hesperopithecus, especially in England,
left Osborn scrambling for the middle ground. "Every discovery directly or
indirectly relating to the pre-history of man attracts world-wide attention and
is apt to be received either with too great optimism or too great incredulity,"
Osborn observed. "One of my friends, Prof. G. Elliot Smith, has perhaps shown
too great optimism in his most interesting newspaper and magazine articles on
Hesperopithecus, while another of my friends, Dr. A. Smith Woodward, has shown
too great incredulity . . ." (Osborn, 1922d, p. 281.)

Osborn was willing to
settle for an anthropoid ape, even if it was not a direct human ancestor. He put
a respected colleague, William King Gregory, in charge of defending
Hesperopithecus. Gregory, an unquestioned authority on fossil primates,
compared the type tooth with Old World monkeys and apes and concluded that the
Nebraska tooth "combines characters seen in the molars of the chimpanzee, of
Pithecanthropus, and of man, but . . . it is hardly safe to affirm more
than that Hesperopithecus was structurally related to all three."
(Gregory and Hellman, 1923a, p. 14.) Later in 1923, Gregory backed off his
assertion that Hesperopithecus showed human affinities and suggested that
"the prevailing resemblances of the Hesperopithecus type are with the
gorilla-chimpanzee group." (Gregory and Hellman, 1923b, p. 518.)

Thus,
even during the "reign" of Hesperopithecus as a putative human ancestor,
many scientists, including its discoverer (Osborn) and its chief defender
(Gregory), did not go as far as Elliot Smith in making overzealous
extrapolations based on the Nebraska tooth.

Field work resumed in the
spring of 1925 at the site where Cook had found the original Hesperopithecus
tooth in 1917. It was material uncovered at the site during 1925 that
assuredly sowed the seeds of doubt about the true possessor of the Nebraska
tooth. As evidence accumulated in subsequent field seasons, Gregory became aware
that, despite the tooth's uncanny superficial resemblance to an anthropoid
molar, Hesperopithecus was probably an extinct peccary. Gregory announced
his retraction in Science at the end of 1927 (Gregory, 1927). The
self-correcting feature of science thereby aborted America's only entry in
humankind's prehistoric lineage before Nebraska Man significantly
affected the opinions of most scientists regarding human
evolution.

- page 34 -

Gergory's change of heart on Hesperopithecus made
front-page news in The New York Times (Anon. 1928a) and was picked up by
The Times of London (Anon., 1928c). Editorial writers for both papers
jumped at the chance to extract a lesson from the affair. The New York Times
opined that

Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn and his colleagues can
snatch consolation from the extinct jaws of the toothsome wild peccary.
For science, as this incident
shows, demands proof from even its most exalted. Nothing ever went through so
many tests as this peccary molar from Nebraska. It survived them all, but then
science went digging in the ancient river-bed again. . . . After which the whole
business was "on the hog." (Anon. 1928b.)

The Times of London also
had some words to say about the "zeal for the discovery of ancestors, which is
so often observed in the newly ennobled." (Anon., 1928d.)

Despite the
editorials, the scientific impact of Gregory's retraction of Hesperopithecus
was remarkably light, especially in America. The scientist who seems to have
been most offended was Grafton Elliot Smith, the English anatomist who had
seized upon Osborn's announcement in 1922 and shamelessly promoted
Hesperopithecus as a full-fledged human ancestor. Four years after the
retraction, Smith, neglecting his own role in the affair, thought that "It would
be interesting and entertaining to discuss some of the false claims by
over-enthusiastic searchers [for remains of fossil hominids . . . such as] the
assumption that the tooth of a Pliocene peccary from Nebraska gave America the
right to claim this 'Playboy of the Western World' (Hesperopithecus) as the
earliest member of the Human Family." (Smith, 1931, p. 20.)

French
paleoanthropologist Marcellin Boule, who had expressed doubts about
Hesperopithecus since the original announcement, seemed only too
delighted to sympathize, "What bad luck for a fossil called on to play a major
role in the history of prehumanity, but also what a lesson for paleontologists
with too vivid an imagination." (Boule, 1928, p. 209.) Long after other
paleontologists had relegated Hesperopithecus to oblivion, Boule
continued to remind the world, in a posthumous edition of his widely used
textbook on human paleontology, that "The Nebraska Ape-Man became a 'Pig-Man'."
(Boule and Valois, 1957, p. 86.)

Osbom, Hominids, and Peccaries

How
could a worker as careful and methodical as Osborn have made such an egregious
error?

Misidentifications and misallocations of fossil specimens are quite
common in the paleontological literature. After publication, these errors are
subject to examination by others in the field and corrections are made in print,
usually without fanfare. Some of the misidentifications are extreme: a fossil
whale first identified as a giant reptile, rodents misidentified as primates,
carnivores as ungulates, ungulates as anteaters. The list is endless, but the
public nature of science leads to quick corrections, particularly when the
biological group in question is under intense study by a number of competing
workers.

- page 35 -

To prevent embarrassing
errors when a new but very incomplete fossil is found, most paleontologists and
anthropologists will make a tentative identification of a specimen and await
further discoveries for confirmation of their find. Overly cautious individuals
await complete skeletons and may never publish their finds, whereas more
reckless ones will establish new species, genera, and families on sometimes
inadequate evidence.

But was Osborn reckless? Why did he not make a more
tentative identification of the ". . . single, small water-worn tooth . . ."
(Osborn, 1922b, p. 1) that later became a cause célèbre?

Three
factors contributed to the mistaken identification of Hesperopithecus as
a primate.

First, the circumstantial evidence of some of the other fossil
specimens associated with Hesperopithecus made the existence of a North
American Pliocene anthropoid a distinct possibility. A fossil antelope, an
animal otherwise native to Africa and Asia, was discovered in the same strata
that produced Hesperopithecus. If an antelope could migrate from the Old
World to North America in the Pliocene, why not an anthropoid?

Secondly,
the sediments that yielded the tooth also contained abundant bone fragments and
splinters that looked extraordinarily similar to bones that had been worked and
shaped by unquestioned humans in the later Pleistocene (or Ice Age) of Europe.
As it turned out, the "worked" fragments from Nebraska were produced when
hyaena-like dogs crushed and split bones to obtain marrow, in the same way that
African hyaenas feed today. To Osborn and his field workers, however, it looked
as if a human culture existed and was preserved in these
sediments.

Thirdly, the morphology of the fossil tooth itself was
extremely deceptive. Even if one examines the tooth after reading all the
literature about it, the tooth bears a compelling resemblance to human or
hominid molar teeth, both in overall size and shape, and in the mode of wear on
the tooth (the latter being the result of an abrasive diet and tooth-on-tooth
contact). After comparing the Nebraska tooth with teeth of contemporaneous
peccaries belonging to the species Prosthennops crassigenus, it is clear
that the Hesperopithecus tooth is not an upper molar, as Osborn had
thought, but a fourth upper premolar (a bicuspid in human dental terms). Keep in
mind that all surface features, those essential to correct identification, had
been virtually obliterated by heavy tooth wear during life and later by
postmortem abrasion in the streams that deposited the sediments containing the
Hesperopithecus tooth. The overall morphology of the Hesperopithecus
tooth matches that of a P. crassigenus fourth premolar, but there is
no similarity in the wear patterns of the two teeth.

- page 36 -

This is an important point,
because the jaw motions of mammals are quite stable, and an animal that chews in
a certain way would be very unlikely to change that mode of chewing and produce
a novel wear pattern in its
teeth. The only reasonable explanation is that the tooth of Hesperopithecus
was rotated in the jaw in life, and that its odd position produced the
primate-like wear pattern. This is not a totally ad hoc idea, because a 90 degree rotation about the long axis of a fourth premolar has been
described and illustrated for the fossil peccary Dyseohyus sp. by Woodburne
(1969, plate 51, fig.
1). Tooth rotation along all three axes has been described for a fossil
carnivore (Mellett, 1977), so it is not an unexpected phenomenon in
mammals, although it occurs only rarely.

Ironically, the similarity
between peccary teeth and those of hominids had been noted 13 years
before Osborn published his description of Hesperopithecus. In 1909,
W. D. Matthew and Harold Cook had the following to say in describing
Prosthennops: "The anterior molars and premolars of this genus of
peccaries show a startling resemblance to the teeth of Anthropoidea, and might
well be mistaken for them by anyone not familiar with the dentition of Miocene
peccaries." (P. 390.) Matthew was Osborn's younger colleague at the
American Museum of Natural History, but he said very little about the
identification (rather, misidentification) of Hesperopithecus as a
primate; his published comments on the tooth stressed its stratigraphic position
rather than its affinities.

Nebraska Man, Bryan, the Scopes Trial, and
Creationism

The consequences for science of the downfall of
Hesperopithecus might have been more serious were it not for other
substantial discoveries in the 1920's, especially Australopithecus
and "Sinanthropus" (Peking Man), that helped shore up the argument
for the evolution of humans from ape-like ancestors at a time when the concept
of human evolution was being attacked by the likes of William Jennings
Bryan.

In fact, Bryan played a pivotal role in the Hesperopithecus
episode. At the end of a colorful political career, Bryan became an instant
leader in the so-called fundamentalist crusade against evolution in the early 1920's. In 1921, trying out arguments that would receive wider
attention during the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925, Bryan preached that
"The greatest enemy of the Bible is the numerous enemy, and the numerous
enemy today is the believer in the Darwinian hypothesis that man is a lineal
descendant of the lower animals." (Bryan, 1921, p. 19.) "Darwin," Bryan
continued, "gives us a family tree which begins in the water . . . and then traces
the line of descent to European apeshe does not even allow us the patriotic
pleasure of descending from American apes." (1921, p.
39.)

- page 37 -

Osborn, in his role as an established American defender of
evolution, went after Bryan in a March 5, 1922 article in The New York
Times (Osborn, 1922a). Osborn
optimistically believed that "If Mr. Bryan, with open heart and mind, would drop
all his books and all the disputations among the doctors and study first-hand
the simple archives of Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he would not lose
his religion; he would become an evolutionist."

Osborn's answer to
Bryan was published just nine days before the Hesperopithecus tooth
arrived at the American Museum from Nebraska. The tooth seemed to be the very
evidence he neededand from Bryan's home state! Here, perhaps, was the
American ape that Bryan had chauvinistically and sarcastically wished
for. Osborn's glee must not have been entirely scientific as he studied the
tooth from Cook. Perhaps the opportunity to undercut Bryan colored Osborn's
analysis of the tooth and perhaps induced him to rush into print
prematurely.

We do know that Osborn gloated over this small, worn tooth.
In his 1922 announcement before the National Academy of Science, Osborn remarked
on the fact that the discovery had come so soon after he had "advised William
Jennings Bryan to consult a certain passage in the book of Job, 'Speak to the
earth and it shall teach thee,' and it is a remarkable coincidence that the
first earth to speak on this subject is the sandy earth of the Middle Pliocene
Snake Creek deposits of western Nebraska." (Osborn, 1922c, p. 246.) Perhaps, he
suggested mockingly, the animal should have been named Bryopithecus
"after the most distinguished Primate which the State of Nebraska has thus
far produced." (1922c, p. 246.)

In May 1925 Osborn again picked up
the theme of the earth speaking to Bryan. He then called on Bryan to honor
his own dictum that Truth is Truth and must prevail. An element of Truth,
Osborn argued, appeared as a diminutive tooth from Nebraska.

What shall we
do with the Nebraska tooth? Shall we destroy it because it jars our long
preconceived notion that the family of manlike apes never reached the western
world . . . ? Or shall we continue our excavations, difficult and baffling as they
are, in the confident hope, inspired by the admonition of Job, that if we keep
speaking to the earth we shall in time hear a more audible and distinct reply?
Certainly we shall not banish this bit of Truth because it does not fit in with
our preconceived notions and because at present it constitutes infinitesimal but
irrefutable evidence that the man-apes wandered over from Asia into North
America. (Osborn, 1925a, pp. 800-801.)

- page 38 -

Almost on the eve of the Scopes
trial, Bryan finally answered Osborn on the subject of the Nebraska
tooth:

Professor Osborn is so biased in favor of a brute ancestry . . . that
he exultantly accepts as proof the most absurd stories. . . . Each new
exhibit,  no matter how largely the product of an inflamed imagination, 
lifts him to a new altitude of exultation, and each one in itself furnishes him
sufficient foundation for unchangeable convictions. . . . His latest "newly
discovered evidence" is a long lost witness captured in Nebraska. He would
probably have declared it
"irrefutable" even if it had been found in some other state,  all the evidence
on his side seems "irrefutable" to him,  but the fact that it was found in
Nebraska, my home state for a third of a century, greatly multiplied its value.
Some one searching for fossils in a sand hill came upon a lonely tooth. . . . The
body of the animal had disappeared, and all the other pieces of "imperishable
ivory" had perished; not even a jaw bone survived to supply this Sampson of the
scientific world with a weapon to use against the Philistines of to-day. But a
tooth in his hand is, in his opinion, an irresistible weapon. The finder of this
priceless tooth, conscious that it could impose upon but a few, even among those
who prefer speculation to reason, wisely chose Professor Osborn. He hastily
summoned a few congenial spirits, nearly as credulous as himself, and they held
a postmortem examination on the extinct animal, which had at one time been the
proud possessor of this "infinitesimal" and "insignificant" tooth. After due
deliberation, they solemnly concluded and announced that the tooth was the long
looked-for and eagerly longed-for missing link which the world awaited. The
Professor's logic leaks at every link, but it is no worse that that of his boon
companions who, having rejected the authority of the word of God, are like
frightened men in the dark, feeling around for something they can lean upon.
(Bryan, 1925, pp. 104-105.)

This spirited exchange sounded like a prelude
to a spectacular confrontation between Osborn and Bryan at the Scopes trial.
Osborn appeared to be gearing up for a clash with Bryan when, in a series of
essays published in May 1925, he singled out the Great Commoner as the man who
would be on trial in Tennessee (Osborn, 1925b). Late in June he was listed as
one of eleven "scientists who will be called to testify in the defense of John
T. Scopes." (Anon., 1925a.)

Then a very odd thing happened, at least as
far as the published record goes. As Boule (1928, p. 208) characterized it, "the
silence descended" on Hesperopithecus at the end of June 1925. The Scopes
trial was about to start, and a genuine American fossil hominoid from his home
state could have, at the least, put Bryan and his colleagues of the prosecution
on the defensive.

Bryan, in fact, was prepared to take on Nebraska
Manupon his arrival in Dayton on July 7, he repeated his comments belittling
the "missing link" founded on a single tooth from Nebraska and, dredging
up one of his favorite lines, told reporters that "these men would destroy the
Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor."
(Anon., 1925b, p. 6.)

Five days later, just as the trial was beginning,
Osborn produced another full-page defense of evolution in The New York Times
(Osbom, 1925c). With Bryan's July 7 quote about the Nebraska tooth standing
as a goad at the top of the article, Osborn nonetheless went through his entire
argument without even a passing reference to Hesperopithecus.

- page 39 -

What
had happened? Quite simply, Hesperopithecus had come to the end of its
short life, although most of the world would not learn of the demise for another
two-and-one-half years. By mid-July, Osborn had
undoubtedly received the first
specimens from the renewed collecting at the Hesperopithecus discovery
site. This material, as we have noted, probably caused doubts in the minds of
Osborn and Gregory over the reality of Hesperopithecus. And what if Bryan
had found out about the uncertain status of Hesperopithecus? If such
doubts had been raised at the Scopes trial, it could have led to disastrous
consequences for Scopes' defense and even for the public image of evolution.
Clearly, it would have been best for Osborn to back off and stay out of reach in
New York. So, having fulfilled his obligation to Scopes' defense with the July
12 piece in The New York Times, Osborn sat out the Scopes trial, not even
submitting written testimony.

A review of the court record indicates that
Hesperopithecus was not mentioned by anyone during the course of the
Scopes trial, although other major discoveries of fossil hominids were discussed
from the stand and in written testimony. Recent claims by Hitching that "the
Hesperopithecus tooth was proudly displayed [at the trial] as evidence
that man had a long evolutionary past" (1982, p. 211) are simply untrue; it is
equally false that "the trial that became a significant turning point in U.S.
educational history . . . was steered towards its verdict by a pig's tooth."
(Hitching, 1982, p. 212.)

With one minor exception, Osborn dropped all
mention of Hesperopithecus in works published after July 1925, and
Nebraska Man sank into oblivion without a great outcry. Bryan died on July 26,
just five days after the end of the Scopes trial, leaving no one of his stature
to assume the leadership role of the fundamentalist crusade against
evolution.

One who would have liked to be the leader of the opposition to
evolution was John Roach Straton, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York
and a foe of Osborn's museum. In a letter to Osborn in 1924, Straton professed
that he was "entirely friendly in my feeling toward the museum. The sole
exception to this attitude in my mind is your so-called 'Hall of the Age of
Man.' Frankly, I, for one, think that you ought to label that 'Our Humorous
Department'." (Anon., 1924b.)

Straton was no mere crank. Even into the
early years of his ministry, he was a believer in evolution, but by 1924 he had
become a strong and articulate opponent of evolution. In a famous debate with
Charles Francis Potter in January 1924, Straton, deftly countering the
pro-evolution arguments of his Unitarian foe, invoked his own strong resemblance
to Woodrow Wilson to argue that similarity of appearance need not imply relation
(Straton and Potter, 1924, p. 58).

Straton's 1924 battle with the museum
subsided, only to be rekindled shortly after the Scopes trial. But the
fundamentalists had failed to discredit evolution in Tennessee and Bryan was
dead, so the attack on the museum became bogged down.

- page 40 -

Before his death in
1929, however, Straton had one final opportunity to chide Osborn. Shortly after Gregory's retraction, the
minister suggested that the Nebraska tooth could be called "Hesperopigdonefoolem
osbornicuckoo in honor of Mr. Osborn himself, who defended the tooth heatedly
and, cuckoo-like said 'Me too' after gleeful dogmatic assertions of Cook, Gregory
and others." Straton, of course, thought that the expose of Hesperopithecus
"justifies my assertion of some time ago that evolution is the most gigantic
bluff in the history of the human mind." (Straton, 1928.)

The
fundamentalists should have gotten some good ammunition from the
Hesperopithecus episode. Even the editor of Scientific American
had to admit that "It looks as if Straton had morally won this round and it
might possibly work out a lot nicer if we of the scientific camp were to concede
it gracefully and get ready for the next one." (Anon., 1928e.) In the same note,
Gregory was praised for the retraction, "knowing as he must have known, when he
did it, that the story of the ape's tooth that was reduced in station to that of
a Pliocene pig, would surely be triumphantly intoned in the songs of hate of
every anti-evolution gathering for a century to come."

Certainly not
every anti-evolution gathering, and maybe not a full century, but the
story of Nebraska Man has continued to show up occasionally in anti-evolution
literature to this day (e.g., Dewar and Shelton, 1947) and has more recently
become a stock item in creationist debates. More than half a century after
Forestier's ill-fated attempt at a reconstruction of Hesperopithecus, one
of the creationist's chief point-menDuane Gish of the Institute for Creation
Researchis still unable to resist making fun of the drawing and repeating the
obvious humor in Osborn's misidentification"I believe this is a case in which a
scientist made a man out of a pig and the pig made a monkey out of the
scientist." (Gish, 1979, p. 130.)

Ancestors, Error, and the Stuff of
Science

Today, with the evolutionary prehistory of humans firmly
documented by African fossil discoveries beginning with Australopithecus
in 1924, Hesperopithecus is little more than a peashooter in the
creationists' arsenal. George Gaylord Simpson even wondered whether the whole
matter needs re-airing"So even famous scientists make mistakes, as all humans
do. Jove does nod. No one was hurt. No one was even misled for long. So what of
it?" (Personal communication, 1983.)

But this mistake involved humankind's
origins, a topic that is inherently provocative, especially in the context of a
creation-evolution conflict. Even after being corrected by scientists
themselves, mistakes in descriptions of human ancestors are likely to be
immortalized in the diatribes of creationists. Whereas a few of the
creationists' criticisms of the fossil evidence for
human evolution are technically
correctas in the case of Hesperopithecusthey are often trivial. The
reality of human evolution cannot be challenged by reference to one
misidentified peccary tooth!

- page 41 -

Good science can be practiced only when
inappropriate external influences, such as politics, are left out. It is clear
now that Osborn's wish to embarrass Bryan may have clouded his scientific
judgment and led him to misidentify a specimen whose affinities required a more
restrained assessment.

Finally, the issue relates to the fundamentally
different values that creationism and science place on error. Creationists are
quick to point out error by scientists, and ridicule it. They go on to argue
that error and disagreement among specialists are indications that the fabric of
science is coming apart, and that it will eventually collapse, with creationism
reigning triumphant after Armageddon.

But what creationists ridicule as
guesswork, and trial and error, and flip-flopping from theory to theory, are the
very essence of science, the stuff of science. Error correction is part of the
creative element in the advance of science, and when disagreement occurs, it
means not that science is in trouble but that errors are being corrected and
scientific advances are being made. Creationism comes on the scene arguing that
the Bible is inerrant as a source of scientific truth and that "creation
science" cannot admit of error because it simply does not exist.

We cannot
conceive of two more diametrically opposed methods of explaining the world
around us. One uses the correction of error as an inherent part of the process
of searching for the truth, or ultimate reality in nature; the other rejects
error or cannot admit its existence. Although it may be human to make mistakes,
it is scientific to correct them. That is the nub of the issue between
creationism and science.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article
was supported in part by NIH grant RROO167 to the Wisconsin Regional Primate
Research Center. We thank Morris F. Skinner for providing us with much
information about the complex stratigraphy of western
Nebraska.

Title:

The Role of "Nebraska Man" in the Creation-Evolution Debate

Author(s):

John Wolf and James S. Mellett

Volume:

5

References

Anonymous, 1922. "Nebraska's 'Ape man of the
western world,'" The New York Times, Sept. 17, sect. 7, p.
1

Anonymous, 1924a. "Ape of the western world restudied," Natural
History, 24, pp. 273-274.

Letters to the Editor

Editor's note:
Creation/Evolution has been featuring an ongoing debate, initiated by Dr.
Norman Geisler, on the question of design in nature. During the course of this
debate, we have received many letters, a selection of which appear here. Because
we wish to give Dr. Geisler the opportunity to respond to the arguments in these
letters, if he so chooses, we are holding off resumption of the formal debate
until the next issue.

I can't wait to have my students in my freshman
class in the processes of science analyze the Geisler articles. Even without
instruction in logic and probability they'll enjoy critiquing the following
inferences, reasonably deduced from a reading of Geisler's thesis.

Intelligence and its application is not natural; it's either unnatural or
supernatural.

Anomalous objects and events are to be assumed a priori
to be the result of intelligence and therefore unnatural or
supernatural.

The use of intelligence to produce a given effect
(object or event) is not natural.

The results of the application of
intelligence do not result in pattern redundancy and therefore cannot be
explained naturalistically.

A rounded, banded stone and an exquisitely
formed crystal are due to natural causes and thus not the product of creative
forces (those controlled or set in motion by a creator).

They know,
perhaps intuitively, that assertions submitted for verification by
logico-scientific means must have their basic terms defined operationally. They
will ask for Geisler's definitions of natural and
intelligence.

They will also conclude that it is no great
intellectual feat to conclude that the discretionary information content of most
humans probably exceeds that of other organisms. A discrepant theologian may
need to ascribe this to other than natural causes. The uniform experience and
logico-deductive thought processes of scientists and others make this effort
unnecessary.

Paul Joslin

- page 46 -

There are a number of confusions and
assumptions made in the fascinating dialogue between Norman Geisler and his
antagonists in the summer and fall 1984 issues of Creation/Evolution. A
brief explanation and clarification of a few of these issues might shed some
light on Geisler's modern rendition of the age-old argument from design. My
efforts will concentrate on those issues not mentioned or briefly alluded to in
the various articles.

The terms order, purpose, and design
and especially the phrase marks of contrivance have been a dominant
feature of the writers in the various articles, but their use has often been
confused. Clearly a design implies a designer, just as a sculpture implies a
sculptor or an effect a cause. These are usually termed co-relatives, since one
implies the other. Whether purpose requires one who gave the purpose is less
clear than the design-designer pair, for common English usage seems less
clear in this case. The word order, on the other hand, does not
necessarily imply an orderer (notice the term is not even a word in
English, and rightfully so). The phrase marks of contrivance just as
obviously implies a contriver, one who made the contrivance.

Order (as a
pattern or constantly repeated motion) is a commonly observed feature of the
natural world. Some of this orderas artifactscomes about by human or animal
intent and is then called design or marks of contrivance (Paley's term).
But order is a neutral term, and, to know whether or not a natural
feature has design and not just order, some observation is required. That Mt.
Rushmore was designed is clear from our past experience with sculptured
materials. Even had the Mt. Rushmore Memorial existed some three centuries
earlier in its present location, the native Indians would have judged it the
product of some intelligent being rather than the product of purely natural
forces. But that is only because four clearly defined human heads
together are never seen naturally. However, given a more sharply defined human
head (or less sharply defined Mt. Rushmore), it would not be at all clear
whether the cause was due to natural forces or some intelligent being. Take, for
example, the Punch and Judy figures in the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern
Arizona. The latter might well have been taken as intelligent design. And such
is the mistake made by Geisler. He assumes that the transfer of information can
only be done by intelligent beings since he knows of no transfer systems that
are nonintelligent (despite the efforts of Fred Edwords and William Thwaites to
show nonintelligent information transfer systems). Geisler remains unimpressed,
however. He, assumes that, like human knowledge, intelligence is the best
explanation for complex information systems. This is, of course, just
anthropocentricism at its worst.

- page 47 -

So, Geisler is right in thinking that marks of
contrivance require a designer but wrong in thinking that information storage
and transfer requires
intelligence just because it does for humans and human contrivances. What
Geisler needs to do first is to show that all information systems require
an intelligence, purpose, and design. But this he cannot do without begging the
question. Random change plus a theory of evolution seem quite sufficient to
explain the complex information content of the DNA helix that produces life
forms. At best, such anthropocentric talk of purpose and design when speaking
about complex organisms may be a linguistic necessity-as some have suggestedbut
these ways of speaking do not necessarily reflect the real world any more than
"it" does in the expression, "It is raining outside."

Allow me one last
observation that may well be the basis for the belief in the viability of the
design argument so often used by fundamentalist thinkers, especially
creationists. These thinkers strongly believe that organic life could not have
derived from inorganic matter, since life can only derive from life (the
principle of biogenesis). Since inorganic matter is not living, it is argued, it
cannot give rise to living organismsonly a living supernatural being can be the
cause of life in this world. They argue that organic matter is more like
God than it is like inorganic matter. But there are at least two flaws with this
basic assumption of fundamentalists.

First, organic matter really has more
in common with inorganic matter with which it shares common elements, obeys the
same laws of nature, and exists in space and time; God shares none of
these. Organic matter can be looked at as just inert matter in a more
complicated state. Clearly, for most life forms here on Earth, matter is more
like these life forms than is God who shares only the vague characteristic
"life" which is not at all like the life forms found here on
Earth.

Second, by analogyand as Jerry Borchardt has correctly pointed out
in the fall 1984 issue of Creation/ Evolutionthe creator must be
an organism in order to have created life and this would require a material body
of some sort. So, if this argument from biogenesis proves anything, it proves
that the creator is a material being and this would make such a hypothesis
scientifically verifiable. . . . The kind of nonmaterial being believed by most
theists, however, can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed scientifically.
Creationists seem to want their cake and eat it, too. They want a being that can
serve as a scientific explanation of natural causes and objects but want this
being to be nonmaterial as well, above and beyond our world of space, time, and
matter. But they can't have it both ways. Either this being is physical and a
source of energyhence subject to the principles and laws of physicsor it is
nonmaterial and above and beyond this world (and hence it could not be a
scientific explanation for the world). Either way, creationists lose.

- page 48 -

To
put the argument in another way, if there is an intelligent cause
of life, then it must be
material, for no known information systems (human or otherwise) have derived
from nonphysical causes. Importantly, the conclusion of an analogy can have no
characteristic not found in the premises. The characteristic of
nonmateriality is not found in any organic beings. Therefore, the cause of
organic beings cannot have been nonmaterial. Logic is not magic. The
nonmateriality of a creator of life cannot be pulled out of a materialistic hat.
The rabbit must be material or forget the logic! This, Professor Geisler, is why
evolutionists insist upon leaving out the intelligent-designer hypothesis; it is
simply not scientific as long as the designer is nonmaterial.

Professor
Geisler would have us teach creationism on the same footing as evolution.
Consider the following class scenario, however. The creationist teacher would
criticize evolutionists for allowing an apparent violation of entropy.
Principles in science cannot be violated and there still be science, they would
argue. Therefore, evolution is not science. At the end of the period, no
doubt, the creationist teacher criticizing evolution would end by pointing out
the magnificence of the creation by God, all from nothing! That this act of
creation violates both the conservation of mass-energy and, perhaps, entropy as
well does not seem to bother creationists. How are creationists going to explain
to little Johnny why evolution cannot violate basic scientific principles but
scientific creationism can do this with impunity! They never seem to realize the
fundamental inconsistency in all this. They usually counter by claiming that
since God made the principles of nature he can violate them at will. Although
this makes little sense, let's grant God this possibility. Once granted, though,
the explanation is no longer scientific. Again, Professor Geisler, this is why
scientific creationism is a self-contradictory notion and why the modern form of
the argument from design must ultimately fail.